(Corrects TVX market value in Trading Gold section in
story published March 5, 2012.)

March 5 (Bloomberg) -- Eike Batista is $3.2 billion closer
to his target of becoming the world’s richest man after warning
Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim that he planned to overtake him.
At this rate, he’s unlikely to take the top spot before 2024.

Batista’s net worth of $29.8 billion places him as the
world’s 10th wealthiest individual, according to the Bloomberg
Billionaires Index. After telling Brazilian media he’d be No. 1
by 2013, the Rio de Janeiro-based billionaire told Bloomberg
News last March he would take first place by 2015. Slim’s
current fortune is $68.5 billion, according to the rankings.

Batista, the son of a former Vale SA chief executive
officer, became Brazil’s wealthiest man selling shares in a
series of interlinking commodity start-ups. He’s poured $2.2
billion back into his companies over the past six years, while
receiving just one dividend payment -- $20 million -- in return.
That’s drained his cash, pushing him to take on at least $1.4
billion in debt as he pursues ventures ranging from gold to
fertilizers to managing Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts.

“With the current horses he has in the race, I don’t think
he’ll make it,” said Eric Conrads, who oversees $600 million in
Latin American stocks at ING Investment Management in New York
and which owns shares in Batista’s oil company, OGX Petroleo &
Gas Participacoes SA. “But it’s always good to have that goal.
Even if you don’t reach it, you might end up in the top five.”

Declining Wealth

Batista’s net worth has fallen from $33.4 billion in March
last year, when he warned he would overtake Slim, after OGX, his
most valuable holding, slid 12 percent in dollar terms. Slim’s
wealth has dropped from $75.3 billion, dragged down by a 14
percent slide in phone operator America Movil SAB. If
maintained, Batista’s $3.2 billion progress in narrowing the gap
would put him above Slim in about 12 years from now.

“You don’t do this from one year to the other,” Batista
said in a March 2 telephone interview from Rio, arguing he still
plans to overtake Slim by 2015. “I absolutely maintain that
goal. I do not regret it, absolutely not.”

Batista’s main holdings are five publicly-traded companies
including oil unit OGX, iron-ore producer MMX Mineracao &
Metalicos SA and shipbuilder OSX Brasil SA. He also controls LLX
Logistica SA, constructing what the billionaire says will be the
world’s third-largest port, and power-generation company MPX
Energia SA. Batista uses the letter “X” in his company names
because he says it symbolizes the multiplication of wealth.

Trading Gold

Batista, 55, began trading gold in the Amazon in the early
1980s after dropping out of college in Germany. In 1983 he sold
mining assets to Toronto-based TVX Gold Inc. in a deal that made
him the largest shareholder and eventually chairman and chief
executive. His tenure saw the company’s market value peak above
$1.7 billion in 1996, before legal battles in Greece and Russia
drove it below $60 million by 2001, when he resigned to focus on
his investments in Brazil.

Now Batista’s betting again on the precious metal, taking
on $1.4 billion in debt for last year’s acquisition of Ventana
Gold Corp., which owns mining rights in northeastern Colombia.

“He never lost the gold bug,” Richard Warke, the former
Ventana chairman who negotiated the sale to Batista, said in a
telephone interview from Vancouver. “I found him very
knowledgeable about the business, the industry’s valuations and
he has a very good team. He is just a very tough negotiator.”

Colombia Gold

Now called AUX, the company has rights to deposits 400
kilometers (248 miles) northeast of Bogota. Ventana had reported
3.5 million ounces of gold before Batista took it private in
March 2011. In his interview on March 2, he said it had 9
million. He said last month he’s in talks with sovereign wealth
funds and other potential “strategic partners” to sell a
stake, and may also conduct an initial public offering.

“This was a deal that was win-win for both sides,” former
chairman Warke said. “I think there is a lot more gold there,
it’s just going to take time to drill it, that’s all.”

Batista hasn’t always been able to bring projects in on
time. His last company to go public, shipbuilder OSX, is trading
49 percent below its March 2010 IPO price after environmental
licensing took longer than expected and forced the company to
move its planned shipyard to a new location. While he had
initially planned to lure as much as $5.6 billion to the
company’s initial sale, OSX ultimately raised just $1.4 billion
-- with Batista injecting about $300 million of that from his
own pocket, according to the transaction’s final prospectus.

Started Production

OGX, Batista’s oil and gas company, started to produce
crude in January, seven months after its original target. Still,
output came just over two years after finding the Waimea deposit
in the waters of Rio’s Campos basin, which prompted Batista to
say the discovery-to-production schedule was “a world record.”

Batista invited OGX skeptics to “drink hot petroleum,”
according to a posting on his Twitter account at the time.

While Batista has earned more than $4 billion before taxes
from asset sales over the past six years -- including $3.4
billion from the sale of an iron-ore business to Anglo American
Plc in 2008 -- he’s since burned through most of his cash. He
sunk a total of $1 billion into his own companies’ IPOs and
another $1.2 billion into notes linked to their shares,
convertible bonds and other instruments, according to regulatory
filings. Last year he bought $311 million in structured notes
tied to OGX after the stock hit a two-year low.

Self Belief

“He obviously believes in what he’s doing,” said Urban
Larson, who helps manage about $2.3 billion in emerging-market
stocks at F&C Management Ltd. in London and bought OGX shares
for the first time near the end of 2011. “His companies are not
going to be a source of cash for him for a long time.”

Batista said March 2 his companies will post close to $1
billion in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and
amortization this year, and double that in 2013.

EBX Group Co., the holding company for most of Batista’s
assets, said in an e-mailed statement that he has a $1.4 billion
investment portfolio. That includes his 30 percent personal
stake in LLX’s Acu port project. EBX values the holding at about
$380 million and considers it a liquid asset.

Based on future production, Batista’s group says gold
explorer AUX is worth $4.8 billion excluding debt, and values
land in Chile where he has secured licenses to build a port at
$1.1 billion. All together, EBX put Batista’s net worth about
$5.7 billion higher than the estimate in the Bloomberg
Billionaires Index, adding that he has no debt beyond that
carried on AUX’s balance sheet. That would put him in eighth
place in the ranking.

Least Debt

“I am probably, among the billionaires, the least indebted
guy of all of them,” Batista said in the March 2 interview.

As his commodity and logistics companies leave the pre-operational phase, Batista is diversifying into segments such as
sports and technology. EBX has entered the catering-services
market through NRX-Newrest, a joint venture with Newrest Group
Holding, and also started IMX, a partnership with IMG Worldwide
Inc. focused on sports and arena management in Brazil, including
Ultimate Fighting Championship events.

Batista is considering investing $2.5 billion in a plant to
make electronic screens in Brazil through a joint venture with
Foxconn Technology Group, a maker of metal casings for Apple
Inc., he said Feb. 15. In October, EBX signed an agreement with
Orascom Construction Industries of Egypt for a fertilizers
partnership that may require $3 billion in investments.

‘Enormous Vision’

For investors such as the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan,
Canada’s third-biggest pension fund with $108 billion of assets
under management, betting on Batista’s projects early on proved
lucrative. The fund invested about $450 million in OGX in
December 2007 after managers met Batista during a cocktail party
at Rio’s Copacabana Palace Hotel. By the time the company went
public less than six months later, that initial investment was
valued at about $2.5 billion, according to the prospectus.

“Eike is one of the few individuals who has both this
enormous vision and this tremendous ability to create very high-quality management teams,” Bill Royan, a vice president at the
fund, said in a telephone interview. The fund owns stakes in
three other companies controlled by Batista.

Batista’s strategy contrasts with that of Slim, who
invested heavily during the Mexican recession of the early
1980s, and last year increased his holdings in New York Times
Co. and Saks Inc. after share prices tumbled.

“Some investors take advantage of crises to buy assets
that are worth a few cents,” Batista said in “O X da
questao,” a book he published in 2011 to explain his trajectory
as a businessman. “I don’t do that. I create wealth from zero
and I’m proud of it.”